Ceasefire.ca

The Ceasefire.ca ad campaign continued this week, targeting political circles in Ottawa by running a second ad in the Hill Times. The ad calls on Prime Minister Harper to “Call off the attack on Kandahar,” an Afghanistan military offensive expected at the end of the summer.

The planned operation, which has been beset by delays and setbacks, risks even more civilian casualties, which have spiked this year.

But still, the prospect for heavy fighting remains. AP reports that, “the United States expects heavy fighting around the key Afghan city of Kandahar through this fall, one Pentagon official said Wednesday, dimming hopes for big gains in the war ahead of U.S. elections and a White House review of its war strategy.”

This ad appears today in the influential Embassy newspaper. Widely read in Ottawa and foreign policy circles, Embassy reaches 60,000 readers every week.

After overwhelming response from our members, Ceasefire.ca published the first of a series of ads asking Prime Minister Harper to call off the planned U.S. and NATO offensive against the city of Kandahar, which risks many more civilian casualties.

Already beset by delays and setbacks in recent weeks, the U.S. military leadership is reportedly reconsidering the plan. The Ceasefire.ca ad campaign is intended to help push the U.S. and NATO political leadership to officially call off the attack.

According to a new UN report, the number of civilian casualties for the first six months of 2010 was 1,271 deaths, up from 1,013 deaths that occurred in the first six months of 2009.  (A recent Afghan human rights agency report put the total civilians killed between January and July at 1,325). The percentage of civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led forces fell from previous years, largely due to restrictions placed on U.S. and NATO forces’ use of heavy weapons and air strikes when civilians are present.  Gen. David Petraeus has recently revised and largely maintained these rules, but is moving away from a strict protection of civilians.

Read More: “Afghan civilian death toll jumps 31 per cent due to insurgent attacks – UN”, UN News Centre, 10 August 2010

“UN: Afghan civilian deaths rise sharply”, CTV News, 10 August 2010

Photo Credit: isafmedia

Peace activists from around the United States gathered in Albany, NY in July to discuss a new comprehensive strategy for peace activism in the U.S. “The plan includes a new focus and some promising proposals for building a coalition that includes the labor movement, civil rights groups, students, and other sectors of the activist world that have an interest in ending wars and/or shifting our financial resources from wars to where they’re actually needed.”

Read more: David Swanson, ” Peace Movement Adopts New Comprehensive Strategy“, War Is A Crime.org, 29 July 2010

This photograph of a Japanese mother and child in the wreckage of Hiroshima was taken four months after the atomic bomb landed on the city in August of 1945. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Sixty-five years ago, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast killed 80,000 people immediately, and injured 70,000 more. Tens of thousands of others died in the years that followed from the effects of radiation.

Three days later, a second nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an additional 60,000 people.

And Canada helped the United States do it.

Ceasefire.ca is part of the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons. I hope that you will join the other 22,000 supporters of Ceasefire.ca who are taking action, today, to move the world closer to nuclear abolition.

• Sign your letter to Prime Minister Harper and other party leaders, and join more than 1000 other Canadians.
• Watch this clip from the impressive new movie on nuclear dangers,
  Countdown to Zero. Then help get it screened in your town.
• Consider participating in an event in your community. (If you are hosting an event, please post your event time and location below.)

Thank you,

Steven Staples
Ceasefire.ca

P.S. As a special “thank you” to our supporters, you can claim a free 3-month guest subscription to Straight Goods online news magazine.  Receive access to more than 10,000 articles by Canada’s leading progressive writers.

To learn how you can have this film screened in your community, visit the Countdown to Zero website.

Moldova’s Ministry of Defence destroys cluster munition stocks in a controlled explosion at Bulboaca training ground, 29 July 2010.

A global treaty that bans the use of cluster bombs, a weapon containing multiple – often hundreds – of small explosive submunitions or bomblets, will take effect today, August 1st, when the treaty, signed by 107 countries, becomes legally binding. Steve Goose, who is the co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, comments that, “Nations that remain outside this treaty are missing out on the most significant advance in disarmament of the past decade.”

Canada became one of the signatories of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in December 2008, but the Harper government has not yet got around to formally ratifying the treaty.

Read more: ”Cluster bomb ban treaty takes effect worldwide“, Cluster Munition Coalition, 29 July 2010

Photo credit: Asle Huse/NPA